Insulae
early modern island perceptions
About the Insulae repository
This repository documents technical aspects relating to my postdoc project on early modern German perceptions of European islands.
The digital side of my project includes:
- Extracting bibliographic information from WORLDCAT and national library catalogues
Challenges of working with WORLDCAT metadata and general statistics
Automatically extracting metadata from WORLDCAT with Python
Managing metadata in ZOTERO library
- Geocoding metadata
Geocoding with Google API
Geocoding with Geonames
- Mapping island history and island publications (using QGIS and web-mapping tools)
a) Mapping number of publications by year and language (using overall number of search results from WORLDCAT filters) b) Mapping German-language publications by genre and origin (original work or translation) c) Mapping publication peaks in the context of events (e.g. discoveries, battles, catastrophes)
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Georeferencing and comparing historic maps (produced by the Homann family) in terms of content, style and purpose
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Distant reading/topic modelling of selected geographic, educational and commercial dictionaries (e.g. using full-text provided by the Bavarian State Library in Munich)
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Extracting information on relevant places and people from Wikidata and the German National Library (DNB)
WIKIDATA entities and properties
Python scripts used to analyse my data are mainly shared in my separate Digital History repository and consecutively discussed in my Doing digital history with Python series on the IEG DH Lab blog.